Business Insider caught up with O'Shaughnessy to get his thoughts
behind the book. Our key take away? Start investing soon, but
don't get obsessed. Try to set and forget your investments as
much as you can.

"Make it all automatic and check your accounts as infrequently as
possible," O'Shaughnessy told Business Insider. "Check out the
services offered by Wealthfront,
Acorns, Liftoff,
and Vanguard that automate the entire
investment process. The less involved
you are, the better. If everything happens behind the scenes,
you’ll be less tempted to make
short-term (and short-sighted) changes to your portfolio.
You’ll building wealth slowly,
over the long term – which is the way it should be."

What's more,
you — the investor — are probably not as great a market timer as
you think, as evidenced by this chart O'Shaughnessy sent over. A
lot of the crowd tends to buy stocks high and sell low. Not a
good call.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

"Human nature
compels us to do the wrong thing at the wrong
timewith alarming
consistency," said O'Shaughnessy. "The investing public buys at
market peaks (think 2000) and sells at bottoms (think 2009), when
they should be doing the opposite. If you can remove your
emotions from the equation, you’ll
do well. As all investors eventually find out, that is much
easier said than done."

Patrick O'Shaughnessy: Eight years. I opened my
first account at age 21.

BI: Did you always know you would?

PO: No. I studied philosophy in school, which
Ambrose Bierce described as “a route of many roadsleading from nowhere to
nothing,” so I was somewhat clueless. Even though my father was
in the investing business, I
still needed to learn the basics.

BI: How did you start?

PO:How everyone should: I put
as much as I could into my 401(k) and then contributed to a
separate investing account as
well.

BI: What's the easiest way to start
investing? Make it all automatic and
check your accounts as infrequently as possible. Check out the
services offered by Wealthfront,
Acorns, Liftoff, and Vanguard that automate the entire
investment process. The less involved
you are, the better. If everything happens behind the scenes,
you’ll be less tempted to make
short-term (and short-sighted) changes to your portfolio. You’ll
start building wealth slowly,
over the long term – which is the way it should be.

BI: How did you get the idea for this book?

PO: Millennials have only heard investing advice
from long-time industry vets, not from one of
their own. Millennials also tend
to be overly conservative with their investments, so I wanted to
help them redefine what is
risky and what isn’t when it comes to their money. I wanted to
reach the newest generation of
investors and give them the background they need to get off on
the right foot – and invest with
success.

BI: Why's your book important?

PO: Most people don’t start thinking about
investing until after they’ve already squandered
the best
investing edge out there: youth itself. This book should help
many young people fix that problem. Our schools don’t
teach us much about investing and personal finance, so we have
to teach ourselves. In my
experience, when you walk young people through the basics, they
start investing right away. That
is my goal with this book: to convince millennials to invest
earlier and in greater quantities than
they would have otherwise.

BI: What's the most dangerous thing about
investing?

PO: Getting in your own way. Human nature
compels us to do the wrong thing at the wrong
time with
alarming consistency. The investing public buys at market peaks
(think 2000) and sells at bottoms (think 2009), when
they should be doing the opposite. If you can remove your
emotions from the equation, you’ll
do well. As all investors eventually find out, that is much
easier said than done. I spend several
chapters in the book explaining how to overcome our
investing emotions.

BI: What's the hardest thing about investing for
you?

PO: Being patient. Millennials are the
instant-gratification generation, so the fact that investing
takes so
long to work can be frustrating. Good investing is not fast and
interesting, it is slow and boring. So in this case,
boring is good.

BI: How much money should you start investing?

PO: As much as you can. There is nothing better
than maxing out your 401(k) contribution. It’s obvious advice, but it’s
true. If you start young enough, your young money has
tremendous potential even in very
small amounts. Get going!